THE QUEENS OF 'MEAN GIRLS' LINDSAY LOHAN AND TINA FEY DELIVER TEEN COMEDY WITH, YES, A MESSAGE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

They're completely judgmental. Proudly superficial. The slightest deviation from what's expected can cause total rejection.

And those are just movie audiences. Teenage girls are even worse.

At least, that's the premise of the new satirical comedy ``Mean Girls'' and its unlikely inspiration, Rosalind Wiseman's best-selling sociological study ``Queen Bees & Wannabes.'' Starring ``Freaky Friday's'' Lindsay Lohan and scripted by ``Saturday Night Live's'' Tina Fey, the movie makes fun of high-school status-seekers (nothing new) while trying to impart Wiseman's messages about the negative impact peer pressure has on impressionable young women (which is unusual, at least for a snarky teen comedy).

The folks responsible for ``Mean Girls'' are both proud of its distinctive intelligence and worried that such relative high-mindedness might make it something of an oddball entry in an increasingly homogenized, cookie-cutter movie marketplace. That concern amusingly mirrors the movie's plot, in which a new girl at a suburban Chicago high school can't decide whether she wants to sabotage or be accepted into the most popular, and therefore nastiest, queen bee clique.

``I love this movie because it's different from what I've been doing,'' says 17-year-old Lohan, who until now has mostly been associated with innocuous Disney remakes such as ``Friday'' and ``The Parent Trap.'' ``It's a way of showing people I can do other things - and it's a little bit edgier. And it's true to how girls are in high school. It's true to how they talk and how they act and how they dress.''

Playing to her crowd

But like an adolescent overly obsessed with her social status, Lohan is greatly concerned about how her loyal audience of young girls will respond to her growing urge to take on more adult parts.

``Because I'm 17, I'm probably more cautious of what people think of what I look like and how people will perceive what I do and how younger people will think I'm closer to that person,'' she says. ``As much as I want to keep doing these teen movies because of my audience, I want to be able to do things that are much more dramatic. Films that are more serious, maybe more indies; I want to really be an actress.''

For Fey, best-known as ``SNL's'' acerbic ``Weekend Update'' anchor and the first female head writer of the venerable comedy show, ``Mean Girls'' represents a different set of growing pains. Graduating from TV to her first film project was not a simple process.

``I'd been looking for something for a couple of years that felt like a juicy enough topic to write a movie about,'' says Fey, 33, who, like many an ``SNL'' player, got her comic education at Chicago's Second City improv theater.

``Sometimes agents would send me novels to adapt, and they were always kind of eighth-level Bridget Jones knockoffs. When I read this book, it sort of took me back to my Second City days, because it felt like it was a socially important, interesting topic that also lent itself to being funny. I thought that was good; if you have something real as a starting point, it's just better.''

Fey wry

Of course Wiseman, whose book grew out of the seminars on teen behavior she gives for the Empower program, was rather nonplussed when Fey proposed adapting it into a comedy. But the author had been turned off by various Hollywood types who had tried to buy the rights, and there was something about Fey's weird concept that struck a nerve.

``The only person that came to me that I even contemplated seriously was Tina,'' Wiseman explains. ``She said, 'My promise to you is that I will try my best not to make it a stupid movie.' I really thought, 'This is somebody I can work with.' I love that it's a funny movie, but it doesn't trivialize the issues. That was really important to me; I felt she got what I was talking about.''

That feeling was mutual.

``The behavior that was laid out in the book felt really true to me,'' adds Fey, who also plays one of ``Mean Girls' '' teachers. ``Like when she has girls in her workshops write these apologies to each other, and they're always the most non-apologies, like 'I'm sorry you're not as pretty as me; that must be hard for you.'

``It also helped me to admit to myself that I had been like that in high school,'' Fey confesses, ``that I had wasted a lot of time and energy talking badly about other girls behind their backs. Jealousy fueled it at the time, but it was poisonous behavior and such a waste. And that behavior, if left unchecked, absolutely follows you into adulthood.''

Heavy. But Fey doesn't want ``Mean Girls' '' natural teen audience to get the wrong impression.

``When people want to talk about the good message of the film, I think, 'Oh boy, we are dead in the water if any kid gets wind that this film is, like, the wheat bran of high-school comedies,' '' she cracks. ``But I just felt that, if there are enough jokes, you can sneak anything else by. Hopefully.''

Like brother, like brother

Mark Waters doesn't seem too concerned about that. Fresh off helming the hit ``Freaky'' remake, the director was so impressed by Fey's script that he saw the project as an opportunity to finally show his older brother, ``Heathers'' screenwriter Daniel Waters, that he, too, could make a smart teen comedy. (This, of course, is a way in which boys compete).

``One of the things that got me the job was I mentioned that I wanted to remake 'Heathers' as if John Hughes directed it,'' Waters explains. ``When I was growing up, teen movies like 'Sixteen Candles' and 'Breakfast Club' were funny and entertaining, but they also had substance to them. However, the current state of affairs is kind of soaked in bubble gum. It's a bunch of music cues and costume changes, and there's not really much else there.''

While certainly not as blackly comic as the 1989 Winona Ryder-Christian Slater ``Heathers,'' ``Mean Girls'' digs into some pretty serious issues. Lohan's Cady Heron, home-schooled by her researcher parents in Africa all her life, initially makes friends with punkish outcasts at her first real school. When the snooty ``Plastics'' (Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried) unexpectedly invite the naive new girl into their exclusive group, her instinct is to hate and secretly undermine them. But as she gets to know her false new friends' vulnerabilities, Cady becomes both more sympathetic toward them - and quite a mean girl herself.

``Something I see in movies about teenagers a lot is a group of girls being mean to a girl outside of the group,'' observes Wiseman. ``But they never talk about the complexities of what's in the group. I think Tina really got that, and this movie is good at showing it. Girl World silences you, Girl World dumbs you down. So she separated Real World and Girl World, and that's what I do. I thought she was really, really good at showing what the consequences are of that.''

So did Lohan, who can speak from very fresh, firsthand experience. The Long Island native knows what it feels like to be the new girl in school - and to be from a place, Hollywood, that may seem as exotic as Africa to her New York peers.

``I was in high school until 11th grade, and I switched to a new school in 10th grade,'' Lohan says. ``When I did that, I didn't really know anyone, just like my character. It's scary. It's intimidating, high school now. Girls can be mean and they look at a new girl like, 'Oh my God, who does she think she is and why is she here?'

``And the fact that I had done 'Parent Trap' and movies and stuff didn't help. People weren't mean to me, but they were sarcastic with me. Older guys, like the seniors, would go, 'Oh, Parent Trap. Whassup?' And my friend, who had red hair and freckles, they'd call her Stunt Double. We really look nothing alike, it was just the red hair and freckles. I would actually go out of my way to be friends with everyone just so that they knew that I didn't think I was better than everyone. I was very self- conscious of that.''

Rivalries R Us

However dispiriting the judgments and jealousies of high school can be, Lohan confirms that show biz makes all that seem - dare we use the word? - trivial.

``I think being in the business is worse, because people put pressure on girls to compete with the other girls,'' figures Lohan, who recently had to go through a very public spat with rival teen star Hilary Duff over pop singer Aaron Carter (which she's quite past now, she tells us). ``Even if the girls don't want to, people make it seem like you have to. And the more you compete, the less satisfied you're going to be. So it's like, just do your own thing and focus in on that.''

From Lohan's point of view, that's exactly what Fey did - and what makes ``Mean Girls'' so special.

``Tina kind of got into it and showed all the details of what goes on in high school, down to the three-way calling and everything like that,'' the young actress says. ``I think it's fun for girls to go see that and see how silly they look. I think girls will honestly learn from that, they'll say, 'OK, there's no reason for me to do this because I look like such an idiot when I talk about so-and-so.' I hope that that's what people get out of it.''

As mentioned, Fey, too, hopes that ``Mean Girls'' resonates positively with its target audience. But like an attention-starved adolescent, the comic writer wants it to be much more popular than that.

``I hope that this movie is funny for adults as well,'' Fey says. ``But I have no idea how to get the word out to adults that it's OK, that it's not a little girl movie. I tried to put jokes in it that I would laugh at.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

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3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) These dolls mean business

(2) Amanda Seyfried, left, Rachel McAdams and Lacey Chabert bring new student Lindsay Lohan into their clique in ``Mean Girls.''

(3) Tina Fey on ``Mean Girls''